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| Authored by: jonathon on Saturday, April 28 2012 @ 09:47 AM EDT |
>The reason that Google, the search engine, is not a monopoly, is that
absolutely anyone can use any alternative search engine, without hindrance or
financial penalty.
Storage POD: 135TB BackBlaze POD:
http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-se
crets/
Also described in
http://bioteam.net/2011/08/why-you-should-never-build-a-backblaze-pod/ et seq.
(Actual cost is closer to US$12,000 rather than US$7,000 claimed by Backblaze.)
Search POD: MicroWulf: http://www.calvin.edu/~adams/research/microwulf/
(Actual cost is roughly US$3,000 --- required parts are not listed in their
plans.)
Search Engine: Apache Solr: http://lucene.apache.org/solr/
OS: Linux (?), NetBSD (?).
I'm aware of the issues in using Backblaze pods for search storage. No doubt
there are more appropriate options out there. However, this hardware is COTS,
and the design was released under an open source license.
Initial cost for the hardware is roughly US$50K.
Ongoing hardware costs will be roughly US$50K per year.
Cost of a person to maintain it will be roughly US$100K per year.
Cost of Internet connection/data transfer depends upon the vendor.
These costs are not out of reach of a SOHO. They are affordable for an SMB or
larger enterprise.
I won't run a cost/benefit analysis of the side effects of setting up an
in-house search engine here, other than pointing out corporate security benefits
--- nobody outside of the organization will be able to determine corporate
interests from analyzing employee search terms on Google, Bing, etc.
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- A winner - Authored by: tqft on Monday, April 30 2012 @ 12:54 AM EDT
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 28 2012 @ 04:06 PM EDT |
It wouldn't matter if they were a monopoly, so long as they did not
abuse that monopoly. In my personal, unprofessional, hearsay, cannot
be called in evidence, experience they do not. The complaint was that
they tainted search pages for product information with ads or search
results for their paid advertisers, thus preventing consumers from getting
unbiased information. Now there's another question, whether Google
have a duty to protect consumers from their own ignorance.
I have used both Google and Bing recently searching for product
information. I count myself savvy enough to include in my search terms
the name of an impartial reviewer I trust. Google returned my chosen
reviewer in the top half of the first page every time, and gave me
geolocated ads for the sought product. Bing made only halfhearted
attempts to geolocate its ads, and my chosen reviewer was lost on page
three or further.
I choose Google because it is IMO a better product. If this makes it
a monopoly, then the rest of the search market has only itself to blame.
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